Freeze!

Earlier this week we had the opportunity to participate in another sort of group activity. The exercise, deemed Comic Strip or Freeze Frame, is pretty self-explanatory from the title. Since we only had three people to work with within a group, it was at times difficult to create the necessary conditions for each "box". To make things a bit more challenging, we were also limited in props, and by limited I really mean weren't allowed to. With Alex and Lucy as my partners, I felt as though we had a charismatic group dynamic. There was definitely a great wealth of ideas, but I couldn't help myself in developing my own. I've recently realized that whenever some new task comes to be assigned, I automatically begin brainstorming and outlining all my ideas. By approaching tasks in this way, I've found a greater success in completion and efficiency. Typically when involved in group situations, individuals will either be too passive or complacent to really make a decision. Essentially one person always rises above the rests to make the executive decisions to keep the creative process moving along. As I sort of headed my group in this way, we decided to build upon my initial idea of a man walking his dog in the park during which he inadvertently meets a beautiful stranger. Eventually, the idea took a complete 360 turn, but was hilarious and faithful to the original idea nonetheless. Upon the completion of each performance, the class and our teacher simultaneously worked together to critique each of our performances. The major trend that seemed to detract from all our performances was a certain superfluity. In our performance in particular, our teacher mentioned that we had a "box" too many. She challenged us to reflect back on our scene and essentially whittle away anything unnecessary. The succinct and vital quality of each box would later lend itself to our realization that this is what will eventually take place as we begin to devise our own independent projects. I have the unfortunate premonition that this will be the hardest part for me considering my tendency towards prolixity and verboseness (as is already evident from this blog).